How the feud between Bob Dylan and Paul Simon began
In the early part of 1966, Paul Simon sat down to begin work on the third Simon & Garfunkel album. At the time, Bob Dylan was causing quite an uproar with his transition away from the Amish world of folk towards electric rock ‘n’ roll. The whole situation opened to the door towards a parody for Simon, and he channelled his lingering peeve into the mocking ‘A Simple Desultory Philippic’.
Simon added a caricatured twist of organ and psychedelic guitar – both elements that had recently entered Dylan’s oeuvre – to the song’s musicology. Then he takes a look at Dylan’s songwriting style by seemingly deriding his penchant for throwing in obscure lines and listing off literary and pop culture references. In a Dylan-esque vocal affectation, he purrs: “Not the same as you and me, he doesn’t dig poetry / He’s so unhip, when you say Dylan / He thinks you’re talking about Dylan Thomas, whoever he was.”
This seemed to confirm what people often wondered, was there a clash between the two biggest folk acts of the day? “I usually come in second (to Dylan), and I don’t like coming in second,” Simon reflected in a Rolling Stone interview. “In the beginning, when we were first signed to Columbia, I really admired Dylan’s work. ‘The Sound of Silence’ wouldn’t have been written if it weren’t for Dylan. But I left that feeling around The Graduate and ‘Mrs Robinson’. They weren’t folky any more.”
While Simon might have admired Dylan and accepted him as an influence, the mockery at the heart of ‘A Simple Desultory Philippic’ was more than just a satire of times touched by a hint of second-placed annoyance. It had a bit more of a bitter history to it than that.
You might think of Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel as the ultimate contemporaries; they both even made the journey over to England to learn the folk ways of Bond Street, but their beginnings were stoney. The week before Simon & Garfunkel were set to play their first scheduled show at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village, Dylan met Simon, and the duo famously had nothing to say to each other in an awkward and cagey encounter.
When the show came about, Dylan slunk to the end of the bar with the critic Robert Shelton; as a hush descended and their set began, Dylan started guffawing at what was supposed to be a spiritual moment. The band kept playing, cutting a vicious glance in his direction, but the laughter didn’t abate, and the whole room cringed en masse. While Shelton said the giggles were merely bad timing, he did confirm that the meeting the week before was frosty enough to open up the potential that Dylan was scoffing intentionally.
He described it as “an encounter typical of New York’s paranoia and instant rivalries”. So, when Simon later penned a song mocking the ‘original vagabond’ it confirmed their status as best of enemies. But time can even put New York rivalries to bed, with Simon admitting that Dylan is an influence and inspiration and Dylan being, well, typically Dylanesque with his distanced and largely silent admiration.
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